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Kicking one butt at a time

money

Picture this – You are cleaning out your purse or wallet and you come across a hidden pocket that you rarely use. You dip your fingers into it and pull out two lotto tickets. At first you feel kind of good. You have an extra chance to win buckets of money. Who doesn’t love buckets of money? Then you take a good look at the tickets and realize they are over a year old. Shit. That sucks.
So what do you do?
Do you:
1. Check them to see if you missed out winning millions of dollars?
2. Do you give them to your spouse and tell him or her to look because you need to know but you can’t bear to look yourself?
3. Do you toss them into the garbage without looking and tell yourself that they weren’t winners because you never win? Besides, you wouldn’t want to know anyway. If they were winners, you would just die of… well… you would just die.

You guessed it; this happened to me. I have a party purse I don’t use very often and I was cleaning it out when I happened upon a small zippered compartment I forgot about. Low and behold, two lotto tickets, one Mega Millions and one PowerBall were tucked inside. Yes, they were very expired. So what do you think I did? Check them? Have my husband check them? Or toss them?

First, you’ve got to be smoking some wacky weed if you thought I was even going to tell my husband. He thinks I am a scatterbrain as it is. Nope, not that choice. I didn’t want to check them either. Before I could think about it too much, I tossed them in the garbage. I knew going any further would just cause me grief. After I tossed them, I poured myself a nice tall glass of wine. You know, to celebrate my decision. (It certainly wasn’t to forget about the tickets.)

That was that. The end of the story, right? Ha! No, of course not. At about 3:00 am in the morning, guess who was digging in the trash trying to find the tickets.Yep, not knowing was too much for me. I couldn’t sleep until I donned a pair of latex gloves and dug around all the stinky junk in the garbage can. It took me about 10 minutes and a lot of mess, but I found them. They were a little damp and one corner was stained by coffee grounds, but still very legible.

With some hesitation, I pulled up the lotto website. First I checked the Mega Millions. The potential winnings were only $50M, so if the numbers came up as winners, I wouldn’t be too disappointed. Anyone knows that you shouldn’t even bother buying a ticket until it reaches $100M. Still, with one eye closed, I peaked at the readout. It was a loser. Next I looked up the PowerBall. This one was worth well over $120M. I might shed a tear…. and some blood if this one won. I tapped the keys on my keyboard and checked the numbers. I realized I could not see the screen with both eyes closed. I slowly opened one eye and then the other. I read the numbers on my ticket and compared them to the numbers on the screen. Not one single number matched. Yeah! I’m still a big fat loser!It’s the first time I’m happy about having the big “L” on my forehead. Now don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to stay a loser, but in this instance, losing was just like winning.

So, with a heavy sigh of relief and a quick shower, I climbed back into bed at about 4:00 am. My husband woke up and asked me what I was doing. “Nothing,” I said. “Just a dream. Go back to sleep.”